While AWS and VMware Draw Closer, Amazon Still Looks to Dominate

AWS and VMware now are partners but it might be only a matter of time before AWS moves to take its own path.

The old days (and by old days I mean two or three years ago) were so much simpler. For those of us following the major public cloud vendors, it was an easy-enough task to classify the various players:

    Amazon Web Services (AWS) was the choice of the greenfield operations. Those that didn’t have any legacy to think about and simply wanted to leverage the most forward-looking public cloud.
    Microsoft Azure was for those organizations that were existing “Microsoft shops.” Not yet compelling for greenfield workloads, it was the bridge between the old and the new
    Google was for the cool kids – those whose primary focus was mobile applications, developer composability and the various other services that Google offers

All that has changed, however with all three players broadening their approaches to more generally cover the needs of both new and existing organizations

On AWS and VMware, a checkered history

Who can forget VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger's pitch to partners from a few years ago. A combative Gelsinger stated clearly:

"We want to own corporate workload. We all lose if they end up in these commodity public clouds. We want to extend our franchise from the private cloud into the public cloud and uniquely enable our customers with the benefits of both. Own the corporate workload now and forever."

Of course, this was back in the day when VMware still had its own ostensibly public cloud offering, vCloudAir. The company has since realized that taking on the big public cloud is a futile strategy and that it’s best hopes lie in helping its existing customers bridge their existing technology stacks into the public cloud.

This is somewhat ironic since VMware came to dominance as a company by making virtualization broadly available. As such, VMware had an integral part in making life unpalatable for the companies who made the bulk of their revenues by selling physical servers – IBM, HP and Intel among them. Virtualization, by allowing physical servers to be driven to ever-higher levels of efficiency and utilization, meant that less individual physical servers were sold. And now VMware was itself being disrupted by new approaches.